You know you’re an English teaching assistant in Austria when…
June 12, 2009
1) You work 15 hours a week and get paid a full time wage.
2) Your students call you ‘Frau Professor’ even though you have no teaching qualifications.
3) Your weekend starts on Thursday and most work days are over by 1pm, yet you complain when you have three lessons in a row.
4) You find yourself accepting every imaginable social invitation and getting drunk purely to fill all your free time.
5) You get genuinely upset when people criticise baked beans in the classroom.
6) You are asked your opinion on the monarchy on a daily basis.
7) You are fully aware of the value of self-deprecation as a teaching tool and use it daily. Anything to make the students laugh (or even half-listen)!
8) Your students are often 2-4 years younger than you and even though you refer to them as ‘kids’, you think ‘Georg’, ‘Patrick’ or ‘Wolfi’ from 8th grade are pretty hot.
9) You find time to make up puns involving the man from Amstetten who kept his daughter in a basement for 24 years, despite the fact this makes you a truly terrible person.
10) After 6 months you can no longer distinguish between good and bad English. You adopt all of the terrible expressions like, ‘the students are writing a test’, ‘we drove there with the train’ and ‘we see us later, yes?’ without realising until it’s far far too late.
